CityFalcon Review – Should You Use This Market News Platform?

About CityFalcon

CityFalcon is a market news platform that leverages artificial intelligence to put together an interactive feed of the stories that matter most for your trading.

The idea behind CityFalcon is a good one – you can easily see stories related to your watchlists and track specific market events. But does CityFalcon execute enough to differentiate it from Google News searches or other financial news platforms?

Keep reading our CityFalcon review to find out.

CityFalcon Pricing Options

CityFalcon is free to get started with as long as you don’t mind advertisements on the site. With the free Basic plan, you can set up three watchlists and five topics per watchlist.

The Silver plan removes advertisements, adds tweets in addition to news stories to your feed, and enables you to set up an unlimited number of watchlists. This plan costs $8 per month or $80 per year, and you can trial it for one week before signing up.

A Gold plan adds access to stories from more than 1,000 paywalled publications, including a number of mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, Kiplinger, and Investor’s Business Daily. (Notably, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are not included.) This plan costs $19 per month or $190 per year.

It’s worth noting that CityFalcon lists a number of features for the Silver and Gold plans as “Coming Soon.” The Silver Plan, for example, is expected to add advanced news analytics and premium topics in the future. However, without these features, there’s relatively little to be gained by paying for CityFalcon as opposed to using the free Basic plan.

CityFalcon Features

News Feed

The news feed is at the center of CityFalcon. The platform uses natural language processing to analyze stories from across the internet and tag them according to what stock or market they relate to.

If you want to find stories about Amazon, for example, CityFalcon will have an up-to-date list of all stories related to Amazon. That list will include not just articles that directly cover Amazon, but also stories that are relevant to Amazon because they cover the same market sector or mention the eCommerce giant. The machine learning algorithm assigns a relevance score – called the CityFalcon score – to every story so you can easily sort out noise.

Notably, CityFalcon covers a lot more than just stocks. The platform collates news into what it calls topics, which include asset classes as well as subjects like technical analysis. You can tailor your feed to only show stock news or you can find articles around commodities, forex, bonds, indices, ETFs, and more. All topics have their own feed that you can access. You can also search CityFalcon’s archive to access stories across topics.

CityFalcon also classifies stories into sectors, and these are much more granular than your typical market sectors. Examples of sectors on CityFalcon include alcohol, e-mobility, home insurance, and robot dogs. You can also pull up a news feed based on country or global region.

You can filter the news feed by date range, CityFalcon score, and source quality. You can also filter stories by sentiment, which we’ll discuss below. The news feed can auto-refresh as frequently as every 10 seconds (auto-refresh is limited to 10 minutes with a free plan).

By default, the news feed is organized according to “top stories” – these are stories that CityFalcon finds to be most relevant to your search. However, the top stories are often at least several hours old, which makes them a lot less useful for traders. The good news is that you can also filter the feed chronologically, which helps surface stories that are no more than a few minutes old.

One really nice thing about CityFalcon is that it groups similar stories. The news feed displays a headline from the most prominent news outlet, then shows stories about the same headline in smaller text. This is excellent for reducing redundancy in the news feed and can be really helpful for focusing on new headlines as they come in.

Sentiment Analysis

CityFalcon recently introduced sentiment analysis, which assigns a sentiment grade from very positive to very negative to each story in your news feed. What’s neat about this feature is that you can filter your feed by sentiment. CityFalcons also charts the change in news sentiment over timeframes ranging from one day to all time, making it easy to see whether news has become more bullish or more bearish recently.

There’s also a dedicated sentiment analysis dashboard where you can quickly check sentiment scores for each major asset class and see a list of stocks and sectors experiencing the most positive and most negative sentiment. While traders should take the sentiment analysis with a grain of salt, this dashboard can be useful for generating ideas.

Watchlists

One of the key features of CityFalcon is that you can set up watchlists to create tailored news feeds. These are very flexible, as you can search not just the names of individual assets but also people, countries, indices, government regulators, and private companies. That’s significantly more breadth than most other watchlists offer, which can be useful if your trading strategies relies on spotting news that doesn’t often make headlines.  

Within a watchlist news feed, you have a few additional options to filter the stories you see. You can choose what language stories can be written in, the minimum CityFalcon-assigned relevance score, and the time range for publication. Keep in mind that CityFalcon’s archive currently only extends back 30 days for free users. Silver plan subscribers get access to a one-year archive of news stories.

CityFalcon Platform Differentiators

CityFalcon primarily differs from other market news platforms in the breadth of markets you can monitor and your ability to search by more than just ticker symbols. This software can be very useful for traders who monitor not just stocks, but also forex, commodities, and other asset classes. The ability to create news feeds around specific, niche sectors is also a plus for traders and investors who want to build a thesis around an emerging group of companies.

The watchlists within CityFalcon are especially powerful. You can monitor news not just for a list of companies, but based on specific ideas. For example, you can scan for news around a specific deal since you can search for people, private companies, and more within a watchlist.

Sentiment analysis is another differentiating factor for CityFalcon. While this isn’t a game-changing feature for traders, it can be really helpful to know how news sentiment around a stock or sector has changed in recent days. The sentiment analysis dashboard can also be useful for generating trade ideas.

CityFalcon Alternatives

CityFalcon is great for swing traders and active investors who want actionable headlines. But its main goal is to organize news rather than to deliver it as quickly as possible. If you’re a day trader who needs up-to-the-minute news to make quick trading decisions, you may be better off with a service like Benzinga Pro.

Benzinga Pro is pricey compared to CityFalcon – plans start at $27 per month – but the news feed is incredibly fast and the headlines and summaries are written to provide actionable information for traders. Benzinga Pro also offers an audio squawk function and the option to talk to news desk experts for analysis on how to interpret a piece of news.

What Type Of Trader Is CityFalcon Best For?

CityFalcon is suitable for a wide range of traders and active investors. Anyone who follows business news can use CityFalcon at no cost and get updates on a watchlist or monitor news around specific companies. It’s a much more powerful free alternative to simply running a Google News search.

The platform is best suited for swing traders and active investors who can use custom news feeds to develop ideas and investment theses. News headlines aren’t particularly slow to emerge on CityFalcon, but they do take a few minutes to appear. As a result, the platform is less suitable for day traders who need up-to-the-second breaking news to inform short-term trading decisions.

Pros

• Free plan available and inexpensive paid subscriptions
• Highly customizable watchlists that act like a news search engine
• Covers multiple markets, not just stocks
• Relevance score for all news stories
• Sentiment analysis shows changes in news sentiment over time

Cons

• Very few extra features offered in paid plans
• New headlines are too slow to appear for many day traders